Testing the Ground
Essentially, learning to walk is something that everybody does on their own, according to Steve Paxton, the late inventor of Contact Improvisation. Why did humans straighten up in the first place? They began to walk upright to have their hands free. The four people dancing in the black white cube at the Secession in Karin Pauer’s performance (Martina de Dominicis, Cat Jimenez, Mani Obeya, Karin Pauer) hold their arms protectively in front of their eyes. They look up, holding their hands in front of their faces. They enter individually. One, two, three, four. They wear green, black and white trousers, black, blue and black-and-white shirts. They exit individually: four, three, two, one.
The garden lies in ruins. The devastation takes many shapes and places. The turtles carry nuclear fission in their shells, and it has crawled into the bones of humans. It would be a dream to call out at this point: But a nucleus, a pip, a kernel is also a seed.
The floor is made of black rubber, the walls are painted white, white marble gravel crumbles in the corners. Large black patterns of nuclear test particles are floating on the glass ceiling, and it looks like they might be drifting down into the room any minute, both gently and deadly, like radioactive fallout. They are also reminiscent of microorganisms, those multiform beings that, in the darkness of the soil (if it’s healthy), ensure that this planet holds together. The patterns and squares of the glass roof are reflected in the black water surface of flat floor sculptures. A testing ground in the face of “hydrogen bombs exist” and “there’s no more to say; we ensure that the harm is as great as it can be”.[1] There is no escaping this chiaroscuro (chiaro: light, scuro: dark)…The water remains still and shining like a dark mirror. You give the planet the form of a tomb.[2] What does it mean to try something non-frontal, to establish contact with the history of planetary contamination? Artist Katrin Hornek has created an abstract concept in the white cube for the “indestructible waste of our glorious construction work”[3], for a…concrete reality, grasses abnormally tall, animals born with one eye.
The search and the bodies’ attempts to talk to each other, to find a language, to connect, takes three hours or the next three thousand years. Then one arm starts to shake, brushing over the calm black water on the floor without touching it. The dancers seem to be aware that there is nothing left to say, which is why they sing together. They sing: “There will be no songs to sing.” In the silence that follows, a metallic sound can be heard, a kind of drip, a sharp click, a trigger? An echo, loud, louder (sound: Zosia Hołubowska). The garden lies in ruins, and the devastation will take new shapes, bodies. The dancers move backwards through the black-and-white space. Four, three, two, one. Now they stand upright. They lift their gaze under the swelling murmur of countless small turtles (soft and heavy bodies made of concrete, polyurethane, latex)…A man jumps into the atomic crater, the water swallows him and remains still and shining like a dark mirror. The dancers all wear the same shoes.
What does it mean to test? What does it mean to dance? They leave individually: four, three, two, one. The last person exits with a solo. He moves backwards, slowly, his gaze raised, as if looking for the drips we hear; not to keep possession of something, but to feel something. The four dancers have straightened up once more, not to raise their hands, but to reach into the ground. Breathing heavily, the dancing bodies work the dead rubber floor with their bare hands as if possessed, eyes closed, surrounded by a droning sound, darkness and light, to unearth something incomprehensible.[4]
Not a testing ground, to keep possession of. A trying ground, to feel. The hands in the soil are connections to different times. The artist’s hands in the soil at Karlsplatz in Vienna touched the ashes of nuclear tests there: Bikini Atoll, 1946. The earth is contaminated. “It is too tedious in the long run to walk around the nothingness that we have created, let’s just go inside!”[5]
Lina Leonore Morawetz, born in 1981, is a writer and translator living in Vienna.
[1] Inger Christensen 1981 in her long poem, “alphabet”.
[2] “A book is just about round. But since to appear it must adjust itself into a rectangular parallelepiped, at a certain moment you cut the sphere, you flatten it, you square it up. You give the planet the form of a tomb. The book has only to await resurrection.” Hélène Cixous, “Writing blind: conversation with the donkey”, in: Stigmata, Abingdon 2005 [1998].
[3] Vilém Flusser
[4] They are screwing something tight (perhaps themselves), there is a droning sound, they are working, wearing themselves out.
[5] German original: “Es ist auf Dauer zu mühsam, um das Nichts herum zu gehen, das wir geschaffen haben, gehen wir halt hinein!”, Elfriede Jelinek, Die Kinder der Toten, Hamburg 1995.